Yesterday’s conference filled my head with thoughts about landfills, and this was exciting indeed. The range of papers from the Neolithic and the Roman to the 20th century provided a complex range of ways to see discard in the past and present. Here are some of my thoughts: 1. Landfils as Lens. One of the… Read More →
Today, I’m presenting my paper on the Alamogordo landfill that I shared last week. As a warm up to that, we were invited to do an interview with a local “influencer.” Here are his questions and my responses: What’s something you find yourself throwing away most often these days? Packaging. Boxes, bags, wrappers, containers, and… Read More →
As readers of this blog know, I head to South Korea to give a talk next week. I don’t think that I’ve shared the complete text of the talk and the images, but just in case next week is more hectic than I anticipate, I want to provide a link today: You can download the… Read More →
Yesterday, I introduced some of the writing that I’ve been doing lately on that Atari Alamogordo Expedition in 2014 (!!). This is part of larger paper on the the archaeology of contemporary landfills. Much of this is based on the first few chapters of my book. The section that I posted yesterday focused specifically on… Read More →
Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a paper that I’ll be giving in August. This is partly because the organizers of the conference wanted my paper well in advance and partly because I’m going to take May and June off to focus on research in Greece and Cyprus. The paper focuses… Read More →
Last month, I excitedly accepted an invitation to attend a conference in Korea hosted by Archaeological Heritage Division of the Korean National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and a group called ICCROM. I have to admit that the invitation flattered my ego (always the downfall of academics) and made me curious about visiting Korea. The… Read More →
My blog is late today mostly because it took me forever to write this new conclusion to the final chapter in the first part of my book project on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. You can check out the book project here and get a broad sense for how the book is organized.… Read More →
Thanksgiving break is always an opportunity to slow down and be thankful for all the little things that make my life better. Historically, I dedicate Thanksgiving day to catching up on grading and taking a swing at the pile of books and articles that I’ve set aside to read “sometime.” Both of these tasks are… Read More →
This summer I’ve been spinning around a good bit lately with various projects occupying my attention for a moment and then drifting off as another project pops to mind. This seems to be problem that I encounter when confronted with uninterrupted stretches of time. Over the last few weeks, for example, I’ve worked on mid-century… Read More →
This weekend, read Laurent Olivier’s The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (2011). It’s good. Despite my best efforts, I’ve been slowly drawn back to the topic of time and archaeology and history over the the last year. Some of this come from my recent, largely stalled, efforts to sort out what it means to… Read More →
I’ve been thinking much more systematically about contemporaneity lately. This is in part because I’ve sent off a proposal for a book on the archaeology of contemporary American culture. While I have no idea whether it’ll be accepted, writing it, and my long-paused Atari article, stimulated me to think a try to wrap my head around… Read More →
I have three little things today that are swirling around in my head like the projected snowfall for later this morning. None of them are particularly profound, but they all might be something later. Ya heard it here first, folks. 1. Abiding and Corwin/Larimore Halls. This is coda for my post yesterday on the current… Read More →
Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of reading casually just a bit in two books. First, I’ve read most of Michael Z. Newman’s Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (MIT 2017), and at the same time, I discovered Christine A. Finn’s Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley (MIT… Read More →
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a little book on archaeology of the contemporary world lately (actually, I’ve been thinking about this book for some time now). I’ve been collecting bibliography for the last few months, and this weekend, between grant applications, I read Rodney Harrison’s and Esther Briethoff’s survey of the field… Read More →
Over the last few weeks I’ve been letting my first draft of an article on the Alamogordo Atari Excavation simmer in the back of my head, and it has really benefited from the comments of my colleagues and friends! The article had some problems, including a bit of a weak focus which made it read like… Read More →
It took me much longer than I imagined to get to this point, but I finally have something scholarly to show for my adventures at the Atari Expedition in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For something less than scholarly, you can read this. This is not a final product, nor will it be the last word, but I feel… Read More →
As Andrew Reinhard is giving a talk on punk archaeology and Atari, I can’t shake the feeling that I should be writing up our experiences in Alamogordo in 2014 (despite having far more pressing things to deal with). Last week, I suggested that our article could focus on issues of authenticity in the archaeology of… Read More →
I’ve been thinking a bit about authenticity in archaeology lately. I know I should be thinking about the 7th century, Early Christian archaeology, Late Roman and Hellenistic Cyprus, or the Bakken oil patch, but on a leisurely bike ride yesterday afternoon, I let myself think about the Atari excavations. To my mind, the key issue… Read More →
